Name Alan Ryan | Role Author | |
 | ||
Nominations Locus Award for Best Anthology, Locus Award for Best Short Story Books The Penguin Book of V, The Back of Beyond: New Stori, Amazonas, The Bones Wizard, Dead White Similar People Charles L Grant, Steve Rasnic Tem, Tanith Lee | ||
Alan Peter Ryan (May 17, 1943 – June 3, 2011) was an American author and editor, known for his work in the horror genre in the 1980s.
Contents
Life
Ryan was born on May 17, 1943 in Bronx, New York. He had Irish ancestry through his grandmother, and Irish motifs were sometimes featured in his fiction, such as in the short story "The Bones Wizard" (1984). An American author of Irish ancestry visiting Ireland for the first time is the main character in Cast a Cold Eye.
He was a nominee for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1980. During the following years he published several horror novels and short stories, but around 1990 he abandoned literature for about twenty years. He returned in 2011 with a new novel, Amazonas, which came out after his death of pancreatic cancer at the age of 68 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where he lived. In 2012, a posthumous collection of his latest stories appeared, entitled The Back of Beyond: New Stories. In 2014, his posthumous novel "The Slave Tree", was released. All three posthumous books were published by Cemetery Dance.
Work
Ryan was a prolific horror author and also a respected editor, with notable anthologies including World Fantasy Award nominees Perpetual Light (1982) and Night Visions: In the Blood (1984, first in the Night Visions series published by Berkley and later Subterranean Press). These anthologies feature works from authors like Charles L. Grant, Robert Silverberg and Brian Aldiss. He also edited Halloween Horrors (1986), Vampires (1987; re-edited as The Penguin Book of Vampire Stories in 1988), and Haunting Women (1988).
Novels
Short stories
Most of his stories were compiled in the following collections: